


Attention to Detail

by Phlyarologist



Category: Horatio Lyle Series - Catherine Webb
Genre: Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2587244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyle tries to do something educational. Tess is Tess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Attention to Detail

"Go on, try it," said Lyle. "It's good for your observational skills."

Tess gave him an unimpressed look and pushed the paper away. "Woss wrong with my observational skills? I been swipin' everything that wasn't nailed down since I was so high" - she indicated a height at which it was unlikely she would even have been ambulatory - "an' you don't get that without bein' good at observational things."

Lyle grimaced, and then somewhat belatedly attempted to reconfigure this into a smile. He was going to have a monster of a headache before long, he knew it. "I won't argue with that, although the manner in which you obtained those skills..." Her expression grew increasingly truculent. One had to choose one's battles. "...is a subject for later discussion. You do have a knack for finding patterns and quickly evaluating general properties. However." He pushed the paper back toward her, let her pull whatever faces she would (and she did). "To be able to accurately recall and reproduce details is an even greater asset, in science, in detective work, and in life in general."

"And in plannin' robberies?"

"Teresa."

She heaved an exaggerated sigh and pitched her entire torso forward onto the table. "You sure you're not tryin' to make me into one of them fancy ladies who go off an' have duels fought over 'em by stupid bigwigs?"

"Of course not." There would never be enough hours in the day, and even supposing there were, the thought of Tess wielding that kind of power in addition to her already formidable arsenal was frankly terrifying.

"'Cos I read that's what fancy ladies are supposed to do. Art an' all. So some nice man will marry them an' look at their paintings an' stop them having adventures, and I _won't._ "

"Come, now. Does this arrangement strike you as particularly artistic?" There were flowers, certainly, but that was because they had interesting organic shapes (complicated contours with small finicky repeated elements, a good thing to study) and not out of any sense of the aesthetic. For God's sake, he'd had no place for them and ended up haphazardly shoving them into a test tube rack.

"It looks like the sort of thing you would do if you was tryin' to be artistic," she said, idly swinging her legs to and fro. "Thought I'd be generous."

"Well," he said, ignoring a faint sensation of heat on the back of his neck, "I assure you I was not."

"That so," she said. After a while she picked up the pencil, looked him in the eye, and said, "No lookin'. I'll tell you when I'm done."

So he did not look, and a few minutes later she got up and shoved a paper into his face. There was a crude figure of a girl surrounded by piles of... something reaching up to twice her height. Lyle frowned and held the paper at arm's length, and noticed that she had helpfully labeled all elements: the girl was TES, and a frenzied series of arrows pointed to everything else from the words THE LOOT.

 _"Teresa,"_ he said again, because sometimes other words failed.

"I wanna see one of your doctor books."

"What?"

"You want me to draw somethin', let me copy out of one of your -"

"The anatomy textbooks?"

"That's the ones." She grinned. "I wanna see where the blood comes out."

* * *

When next Thomas came to visit, Tess was folded up in an armchair around one of said "doctor books" - one Lyle had covertly added to his collection only the previous week, because it kept her occupied and it was a better investment than those ghastly pulp novels. In her hands, however, it was not appreciably any less ghastly.

"Bigwig!" she said, looking up. "Come look at this!"

Lyle stopped Thomas in the doorway and leaned down nearer to him. "I suggest you don't," he said, _sotto voce,_ "she's got onto skin diseases this week-"

But it was too late. Thomas, polite young man that he was, had already crossed over to her to ask what she found so fascinating, and was soon enough distressed to realize that the answer included the word "pustules."

Still, when Tess handed over her copies of the plate illustrations later that day, they were impeccably rendered (which is to say precisely as unpleasant as the source material). The exercise was probably a success. Probably.


End file.
